Guy Chamberlin

I recommend Elmer's glue and sand for the desert regions.

If we're being totally honest.....these and other protests may well be affecting the Presidential election. I take that bridge all the time and would be really pissed if I was on my way to the airport. People in Marin County hate to be inconvenienced, and these things make us suffer just like the Palestinians.

Yeah, teach, I'm pretty sure the invasion intends to get the hammy terrorists, but you and Ben Netenyahu are suggesting that the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children are acceptable collateral. Others might observe that this general dehumanization of Palestinians is a big part of the problem. Others still have noted that Netenyahu has always intended to colonize Gaza, and has historically propped up Hamas because they make his job easier. I hope you are not sharing your genocidal beliefs with your pre-K art students.

Yeah, but when people complain about Russia interfering with our elections, they're merely hypocrites. When people claim Russia isn't interfering with our elections, they're naive or willfully dishonest. One party doesn't want to consider Putin's motives at all. It's leading candidate disagrees with you. I also think social media has changed the equation a bit: it was sobering for Americans to consider the sheer number of posts and accusations we consumed that were churned out by Russian bots America's most famous interventions in other countries' elections tended to be bipartisan and well-hidden from the American public. A public that didn't much know or care either way.

When haven't we?

I think the issue is the 30,000 citizens, most of them women and children, who have already been blown to s#!t, and the thousands more currently being starved to death. Sure, you can say f#&% them, but they've already been f#&%ed by all sides. Also if you advocate "get rid of them all" you can't mock the pro-Pally bros who are calling it genocide. Just own it, I guess.

It's already a quagmire. But the death and starvation among civilians in Gaza has reached horrific proportions, and some of this is a Netenyahu issue more than an Israeli issue. Regardless of election timetables, doing nothing is becoming less of an option. The question is whether either Hamas or Netenyahu would intervene if a powerful ally/enemy is dispensing aid to the people the ally is attacking and the enemy is avenging. The other question is whether you help starving people who are being prevented from getting aid, and that's an easier answer.

You would actually have to read the detailed budget and ROI he always provided for his proposals. Might surprise you. As mentioned, what's often decried as government hand-outs and socialism typically offer long-term benefits for a larger scope of business interests. You'd have to favor longer-term systemic solutions over the immediate gratification of the few, which, interestingly enough, used to be a conservative value.

Yeah, there was something about 1980s-90s AM radio that sounded new and different to me, and it took its lead from Waco and the OKC bombing. That's where the rightwing messaging morphed into dark warnings of the coming civil war.

Well he comes from the same line that got you social security, two day weekends, child labor laws, and Veteran Benefits reform. He can also run circles around you explaining how the private sector actually works.

Sending a modest contingent of armed personnel to protect the deployment of civilian aid is the time-tested, UN-approved international response. If one side attacks them, they lose support from all sides.

So.......it's not the good or horrible things you do, it's your faith -- one might say "loyalty" -- to God. Well that describes the Trump dynamic pretty well.

There are politicians of all stripes who parlay a small local electorate into a larger role at the fancy state capitol, where they immediately get drunk on their ability to make life hard for people who are smarter and better than they are.

We would also have had a better idea of what was happening and who was stirring the pot if the World-Herald and Journal-Star had not been decimated of the reporters who once tracked this sort of thing. Like I said. Stupider and angrier. It actually is an agenda.

I know it might not matter to some folks, but this kind of thinking will drive good professors and researchers away from the University at a huge cost to the institution and the state. There's a movement out there to make America stupider and angrier, and it's going to backfire on everybody.

Not "single" parent, Archy. It's Children born out of wedlock coupled with median household income by race. If it's not a systemic racial issue, what's the point of the graph itself? Who knows? Since the author uses the phrase "out-of-wedlock" perhaps the graph is from 1890.

Yeah, I paraphrased this wrong. The Top 1% hold as much wealth as the bottom 90%, which doesn't exactly undermine the larger point. The 20% figure has been bandied around, but this same Princeton report says 15.7% is more accurate. I have a feeling the 8% claim will always have a whiff of urban myth, but when Warren Buffett says he has a lower tax rate than his secretary, I believe him. https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/top-wealth-in-america-new-estimates-under-heterogenous-returns/ Your suggestion for a more aggressive tax on billionaires is intriguing. Less government spending is good as long as it's smarter and considers the unintended consequences -- which it usually doesn't. We need to take a less partisan and contentious look at how government spending on everything from mental health services to education to social safety nets to health care affects the private sector. While one party likes to assume anything government funded takes away from our for-profit free enterprise, many of these programs directly and indirectly help U.S. companies do business.

Even the politically correct think Gemini has gone too far.

Well you basically reverse engineered a non-question into a point you were keen to make. But 46% sounds pretty good to me. I'd still recommend closing the biggest loopholes and pursuing the most egregious dodgers. Maybe bump a couple of those thresholds. Remember, "fair share" comes from percentage of income and ability to pay, not lump sum. That's the only way it really works. The reason the "fair share" argument gets so much play despite our progressive tax rates is the fact that the wealthiest 400 families in America -- all billionaires -- paid an average individual tax rate of just 8.2%, while the folks genuinely struggling paid around 14%. Huge corporations dodge a s#!t ton of taxes that small businesses can't. It's less galling to think of the 1% shouldering that 46% tax burden when you realize they hold 90% of the wealth in the U.S. That top 0.1% holds 20% all by themselves. And while that's wealth, not income, it's hardly like the two aren't related. Extreme wealth has paid for the perception that 46% is the number you should be watching, and that higher tax rates hurt business. There are decades of evidence suggesting otherwise.

It's true. The only way this happens is if you're unwittingly caught on a hot mike.

When I went to UNL in the glory days of football, the UNL Board of Regents were absolutely loaded with dimwits and s#!theads. But they generally didn't touch athletics.

Even at our most well-intentioned, it's hard to imagine the larger internet collective so overtly advising Ai to rewrite history, and that's not taking into account the half that actively prefers to whitewash things like slavery. But it's a damn interesting question.

You may have missed some of the early fireworks. Among the many stupid things Gemini AI has done is put Black people into historic photos, including pre-integration military units and sports teams. When users told Gemini that there were no Black players on the 1923 St. Louis Cardinals as Gemini depicted, Gemini gave them a little lecture on inclusivity, apparently having been programmed to favor diversity over historical accuracy. Stuff like that.

If you wanted to create the worst possible example of Wokeness Run Amok, it would be the Gemini ChatBot, and whoever programmed it. I don't know if you can call it a Democrat thing, but it's pretty embarrassing. In the spirit of machine learning, Gemini is in the process of correcting itself.

Careful. Pointing out an opportunity for Black people to overcome their out-of-wedlock economic situation comes dangerously close to admitting systemic racial issues still exist.